Asked how they are, most people have four answers: fine, tired, stressed, bad. Four words for a range of experience that has hundreds, and the shortage is not cosmetic. What you cannot name, you cannot do much about.
Why the exact word changes the intensity
There is a well-studied effect in which putting a feeling into specific words reduces how strongly it registers in the body. It is not suppression and it is not reframing. Simply finding an accurate label appears to change the volume.
The important part is accuracy. Naming a feeling stressed does very little, because stressed is a bucket. Naming it as I am afraid this will be held against me for years does a great deal, because that sentence is either true or it is not, and it can be answered.
Stressed is a category, not a feeling. The relief is in the sentence underneath it.
Four words is not enough
People with a larger emotional vocabulary cope measurably better, and the reason is mundane rather than mystical: more words means finer distinctions, and finer distinctions mean better decisions about what to actually do.
Disappointed, humiliated, lonely and overlooked all get called upset, and each one calls for something completely different. Lumping them together guarantees the response will be wrong.
How to find the real one
Start with the vague word and ask what kind. Bad, what kind of bad. Heavy or sharp. Old or new. About a person or about yourself. Each question narrows it, and usually within four or five steps a sentence arrives that lands differently from the others.
You will recognise it physically. Precision has a distinct feeling: something in the chest or the shoulders lets go slightly, even though nothing about the situation has changed.
Why on paper
Out loud, the search for the right word gets rushed, because someone is waiting and imprecision is socially easier. On a page there is no audience and no hurry, and you can write four wrong words before the fifth one is right.
That fifth word is the entire exercise. Everything else is scaffolding.